Godless in America

Play all 5 parts

From Atheist Media:

“The amazing life – and disturbing death – of an extraordinary woman who successfully challenged the place of God in American life for 30 notorious years.

Madalyn Murray O’Hair had come to occupy a special place in the American psyche since her 1963 campaign which ended compulsory prayer in US schools after a Supreme Court action on behalf of her son William. O’Hair’s campaign succeeded, but she became the most hated woman in America (her own label), as she fought to take the name of God off the dollar bill – and her son became a born-again Christian.

Then, on a summer’s day in 1995 , she suddenly disappeared, leaving her breakfast dishes on the table – and half a million dollars missing from her organisation’s bank account.”

3 comments religion

The Living Dead

Running time: 1 hour

Part 2 (1 hour)

Part 3 (1 hour)

I have previously posted links to almost all of Adam Curtis’ superlative documentary series apart from this, which examines how the memory of the Second World War was manipulated and changed during the Cold War, in various countries and to suit political ends.

Curtis’ documentaries are always worth watching, they fulfill the instinctive craving that humans have for conspiratorial drama while remaining intelligent, a patently difficult task considering the paucity of other examples. To be fair, Curtis’ pieces are less about secretive cabals than unabashed manipulation through political spin, in an era of manufactured consent.

Despite being a fan of Curtis’ films, I have a problem with the core intellectual premise than envelopes almost everything that he has done. Not only are there few of the secret cabals of the conspiracy theorists that Curtis outshines, which would be like trying to herd tigers (its difficult enough to organize ordinary people, let alone powerful ones with large egos), there is no need for manufactured consent on the scale of what Curtis alleges.

Curtis’ argument is by design, that people are manipulated deliberately. This is something that I would argue is an example of teleological illusion, the hardwiring of human brains to see a creator in everything. If we turn the chain of cause and effect around the other way, then consent isn’t so much fabricated by others, but self-emergent, fabricated by personal desire. Since this requires far less effort, it is more likely to happen most of the time.

The counter argument is that manipulation clearly exists in the real word, from totalitarian propaganda to the seemingly banal world of advertising. The rebuttal is therefore a bit more subtle: that the evolutionary niche that allows for the survival of such things as advertising in a society, and the subsequent manipulation of instinct and desire is actually a product of that desire and driven by it.

This has different implications. Unlike undesirable political manipulation, if the marketplace for distortion of reality is created by us, and if we overcome our irrational desires through reason, it will go away.

We create a fiction to feed our desires and this is a more powerful force than the standalone manipulation comprising manufactured consent, which in turn is more likely than active conspiracy.

In other words, the real world is controlled by Self-delusional Consent.

7 comments history, politics, series

Confidential File: Medical Quacks

A half century old exposé on medical quackery from the television show Confidential File hosted by Paul Coates.

I’m putting this up to illustrate the point I’ve been banging on about in the comments thread under the clip of present day quack, Gary Null: that harmless things like homeopathy can kill people because they prevent them seeking proven treatment.

The interesting thing about this film from the 50s is that it was an era where science was perceived quite differently from now. Science was held in high esteem in the US, but for cultural rather than rational reasons. This was the post war era of scientific spectacle that stretched from the Atom Bomb to the Apollo Program.

The quack medicine in this clip is more stylistically modern than today’s, being based on science itself and machinery and terminology from the atomic age. Today’s quackery is more often based on a reaction against the clinical aspects of science and is more likely to use rustic, ‘natural’ terminology. However, with this fashion, comes a rejection of reason itself, everything becomes relative and expressions like ‘proven treatment’ are taken to be a matter of opinion rather than evidence. This often makes today’s pseudo medical practitioners very difficult to pin down.

Today reason is unfashionable. But it shouldn’t be a matter of fashion, either way. We have regressed, by mistake.

2 comments FEBL, pseudo science

Keynes’ Begging Trip to America

After WWII, which Britain had fought with American weapons while being supplied with American food, the UK was heavily in debt and on the brink of bankruptcy while the US economy was booming. The US demanded repayment for the wartime loans and so John Maynard Keynes went to Washington to ask for an $8billion bailout. He was refused, but given a loan of half the amount on condition that made the US dollar the new reserve currency. This loan was only paid off in 2006.

What does this have to teach us about today? In the details, not very much, but in the big picture view, it says a lot about how we might expect creditors such as China and Japan to behave towards the US, now that dollar priced hegemony may be ending. The current strength of the dollar is a panic move and prefaces an increasingly likely collapse, during which the US will be at the mercy of Asia.

If you want to get really spooked consider this:

“Victor Shih, a specialist in Chinese central banking at Northwestern University, said that when he visited the People’s Bank of China for a series of meetings this summer, he was surprised by how many officials resented the institution’s losses [on dollar assets].

He said the officials blamed the United States and believed the controversial assertions set forth in the book “Currency War,” a Chinese best seller published a year ago. The book suggests that the United States deliberately lured China into buying its securities knowing that they would later plunge in value.”

In other words the fate of the US economy may be in the hands of people who believe in conspiracy theorists. See the full piece here on Yves Smith’s great finance blog.

(despite the jingoistic commentary next to this video clip, on YouTube, its a serious piece by a well respected British historian)

4 comments business, history

After Paradise – Contemporary Art in Iran

A documentary about Iran’s nascent contemporary art scene which started to re-emerge 20 years after the revolution. This was largely due to Iran’s baby boomers growing up, creating one of the youngest adult populations on Earth.

The fact that Iran has a very young population is very often overlooked. It gives hope for a more progressive secular culture as suggested by the odd fact that Iran was the third biggest country after the US and Brazil, on Google’s social networking service, Orkut.

Running time: 36 mins.

2 comments art

Gary Null’s Anger Management

Today is FEBL day, and our last example is this from Gary Null. Null communicates all manner of nonsense about health and has a huge axe to grind against doctors. His ideas are widely accused of being very dangerous.

Null speaks in a a very soft, unnaturally calm voice, which scares me, and runs a class on anger management which we show at the top.

In the clip below, we see him becoming very angry and losing his shit altogether. The anger is directed against vaccination, something that individuals undertake for the welfare of the community, an act which has saved the lives of millions.

Null has a problem with the astronomical amount of evidence about the benefit vaccinations which seems oddly personal, and his rage seems to point to a slight flaw in his anger management teaching. Like many of the people in the FEBL category, however, he doesn’t seem to have a sense of irony or humor.

This for me sums up Null as an extremely unstable charlatan. He goes into the FEBL hall of shame.

32 comments FEBL, pseudo science

Laughter Yoga

From the laughing instructor in the video “the laughter does not need to be sincere, it can be faked or simulated”.
In other words, laughter yoga is like a comedy for people with no sense of humor. Anne Coulter fans will be right at home.

[Update – someone kindly dug up an example of this preposterous crap in action, I’ve added the clip below the original]

2 comments FEBL, religion

Ben Goldacre Interview

I’ve just finished Reading Ben Goldacre’s book, ‘Bad Science’, that lambasts various forms of quackery and pseudo science. Here is a New Scientist interview with him. I have also embedded a clip of Gillian McKeith a well know TV presenter in the UK, who encourages people to eat healthily, but does so in a way that is wrong and deceptive. A whole chapter of Bad Science is devoted to her.

For example, McKeith calls herself (or used to call, before the Advertising Standards Authority had a draft adjudication against her) a doctor and refers to her patients. She is neither a medical doctor, nor does she have a PhD from an accredited university. She does have an accreditation from a Nutrition institute that Goldacre managed to obtain membership for his dead cat for $100. The award hangs in his toilet.

Gillian McKeith is our latest recipient of the Smashing Telly FEBL (Fucking Entertaining Big Lie) award, which consists of being tagged FEBL

3 comments FEBL, pseudo science, science

Design Classics, The London Underground Map

There was a period, between the wars, when European refugees like Gropius stopped in Britain. This stimulated a brief flourishing of modernism resulting in the design aesthetic of London public transport, from the Routemaster bus (the only piece of British ‘architecture’ that Corbusier liked) to moderne Tube stations such as Arnos Grove.

But the pinnacle of London Transport’s modernist design was the Tube map which rearranged distances to produce a supremely navigable schematic diagram that is little changed today. (I have been looking for this documentary for ages).

26 comments architecture

Banking With Hitler

Contradicting the notion that the Swiss were alone in banking for the Nazis. There are lots of very poor documentaries about this kind of thing, don’t let that put you off.

1 comment business